That second paragraph is the sharper point, and it's one I hadn't fully sat with until you said it. An empty result on a general-purpose search engine reads as "not in the index yet" because everyone's implicitly aware indexes are incomplete. A kid doesn't have that mental model — an empty result just reads as "broken" or "doesn't exist," and there's no good way to explain "we haven't crawled that yet" to an eight-year-old without it sounding like an excuse.

Took it as a direct prompt to go fix the actual empty-state on kids.findnix.eu — it was saying "No results found, try different search terms," which is exactly the adult-index framing you're describing. Changed it to frame the mascots as still looking ("Uli and Nele haven't found anything for that yet!") and paired it with a direct link to suggest the page, so a dead end turns into an action instead of a wall. Small copy change, but your comment is the reason it happened today rather than never. Thanks for that.